Introduction
As technology gets more advanced over time, the volume of data produced every day keeps on rising.
The more data is produced, the more demand grows for insights. These insights can help businesses make decisions that eventually help them generate more conversions.
When it comes to deriving favorable insights from huge volumes of customer feedback data, one process has recently become popular.
Yes, we are talking about text analysis or text analytics.
Text analytics is the technique used for extracting meaning from unstructured data (text communications) in order to track various factors like user comments, consumer opinions, and product reviews.
Text analysis can convert enormous amounts of unstructured data into something meaningful.
10 Advantages of studying consumer feedback using text analysis
Text analytics is commonly used in the context of user feedback. It is deployed to analyze and break down the material in open text fields inside a feedback form.
Some of the techniques used for text analysis comprise the following: word frequency, word pairing, sentiment analysis, and feedback comment tagging.
Before we go ahead and figure out the various techniques of text analysis, let us first understand the enormous advantages of this particular process.
1. Locate the source of the problem
To understand what drives customer satisfaction and what hinders it, text analysis can play a crucial role. This can be done by asking open-ended questions.
Let us see an example of such a practice.
In many scenarios, especially in online marketplaces, customers often abandon their cart midway without explaining their behavior.
In such a scenario, companies don’t have enough evidence to point out any specific pain point that’s causing cart abandonment. There are other similar customer behaviors as well that don’t come with an explanation.
If over time, more customers tend to abandon their cart in a similar phase, you might get to the source of the problem through text analysis. Your text analytics process is highly probable to highlight this customer trend using repeated words like 'purchase,' 'shopping cart,' or 'checkout,' and monitor customers’ sentiments behind such words.
To learn more about text analysis and how you can practically implement it, consider reading this text analysis guide.
2. Understand NPS metrics
There have been situations when organizations notice that their Net Promoter Score (NPS) is decreasing, but they are unable to explain the reason behind it.
For those who don’t know, NPS is a frequently used market research metric that consists of a single survey question that asks respondents to rate the chance of recommending a product, service, or company to a colleague or a friend.
If customers don’t explain their problem with a brand, it gets quite tough to measure the factors behind a falling NPS. This is where text analysis comes to your rescue.
Text analysis assists users in visualizing trending feedback categories. It also helps resolve the issues quickly.
Thanks to text analysis, unheard customer thoughts and opinions can be brought to the surface. This allows organizations to produce the best possible customer service in order to keep their clients satisfied.
3. Efficient and swift prioritization of issues
With text analysis, you can quickly determine which areas of your business you need to focus on improving or which areas you already excel in.
This can be done by identifying the most commonly used terms or using a technique called “word pairing” (more on it later).
It is a given that the faster you can detect a problem and the quicker you solve it, the better are your chances of success.
4. Ensure that your customers are heard
It's understandable that customers want to share their feedback and they want businesses to hear them.
However, in many cases, they don’t tend to comment about the challenges they face while using any particular service or product.
In such scenarios, text analysis can make the process of gathering feedback a lot easier for you. When you put in the effort to listen to your consumers' input, they realize that you are interested in improving their experience. This makes customers happier and more likely to do business with you again.
Did you know that most highly engaged employees are loyal?
Also, happy customers are more likely to stick with your company and make repeat purchases.
Through text analysis, you can figure out customer sentiments and eventually improve your service or product in a way that not only benefits your customers but also improves your profitability.
The more effort you put to hear their sentiments, the better are your chances to enjoy consistent long-term success. Here are the seven ways you can build a positive customer relationship.
5. Full budget control
The data and insights derived using text analytics can help you make better budgeting decisions.
It can help you prioritize the key areas that require the most investments. Also, it helps you detect those areas that require the least investments.
As a result, you can put more attention to areas that matter the most to your customers.
At the end of the day, your business success depends on how well your customers are enjoying your offerings. And that is made possible by text analysis.
6. Work with unstructured data more efficiently
Putting unstructured data into a format that typical analytics systems can understand is one of the most time-consuming aspects of working with it.
This is where text analysis can help.
Using text analysis, you can use data and derive meaningful insights without the need of converting it or carrying out time-consuming manual procedures.
7. Make data-driven decisions
It’s a no-brainer that text data and verbatim remarks from customers provide you with valuable information that can help improve your decision-making process.
You can learn more about why consumers rated your firm in the manner they did on a survey or how they welcomed or treated your new products and services.
8. Take advantage of new opportunities right away
Let’s be honest! Markets can shift dramatically in an instant. This can be a result of continual feedback, innovations, and new technologies.
Using text analytics, you can get access to this data, allowing you to identify new opportunities that will give your organization a competitive edge.
You can analyze the data to see if your customers mention unexpected ways to use your product.
Next, you can generate resources to support that use case, produce products to satisfy that segment or extend horizontally into a new market.
9. Objective outcomes
When manually evaluating data, it's natural to make mistakes or be biased, not to mention the amount of time spent going over each comment individually.
However, that’s not the case with text analysis.
The results of text analytics are objective. This means that one would obtain the same results no matter who looks at the data or how they do it.
Obtaining unbiased insights is crucial for making business decisions and text analysis helps in doing that.
10. Evaluate the impact of your advertising campaigns
Using text analytics, you can find out what your customers think about your ad creatives and copy.
You can understand if they see your ad copies as positive, neutral, or negative. This allows you to fine-tune your promotional materials and enhance your campaigns.
It happens to be one of the biggest benefits of text analysis since its findings generally go beyond the general parameters that are recorded by average marketing and advertising software programs.
Popular techniques for text analysis
Now that we have discussed the potential advantages of deploying text analysis for understanding customer intent and sentiments, now let us shift our focus to practicality.
Here are the top text analysis techniques you should be aware of:
- Word frequency
This is text analytics in its most basic form, where subjects are counted and prioritized depending on how frequently they have been mentioned. This is useful for swiftly finding frequent concerns and topics among your customers.
- Word pairing
A collection of words can often give you more information than a single phrase. When phrases like "expensive", “price”, and "monthly" are paired together, you can reasonably assume that customers believe the monthly price for your product or service is excessive.
- Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analytics (also known as Opinion Mining) is a branch of NLP (Natural Language Processing) that allows users to assess feedback severity based on the use of positive, negative, and neutral terms, as well as the sentiment associated with these frequently used phrases.
- Feedback comment tagging
When sorting through feedback, it's crucial to have a system that allows you to filter and locate feedback based on the contents of comments. Tagging and categorization can help with this.
Conclusion
As you can see, having a text analysis practice within your organization can help your feedback program tremendously.
There are many ways to gather customer feedback but how you analyze it is more important.
According to Phi Dang, CEO of Sidepost, “The feedback your customers provide can help disclose previously unidentified pain spots and the rationale behind your company’s NPS and CSAT scores.”
More crucially, text analysis can provide you with the insights that you need to improve your business and enhance your customer service.
However, simultaneously, it is crucial to have the right text analysis software in place.
Without it, analyzing this type of data would be an extremely complex and burdensome experience. So, make sure that you invest in a top-notch program.
About the Author
Kate Brown specializes in SEO copywriting, combining a unique background in journalism, content writing, copywriting, e-commerce product listing, and SEO to provide engaging content that has been proven to increase engagement, conversions, and sales. A decorated SEO copywriter and creative professional who wields cutting-edge digital tools and a natural aptitude for SEO copywriting to enhance the visibility of a diverse range of businesses.
